Start Your Engines: Photography’s Romance with the Car

By ERIC NAGOURNEY

July 10, 2017

Society’s love affair with the automobile endures, but it’s hard to come away from the images on display at a new exhibition about photography and the car without wondering: Can the passion survive?

Sprawling development, vast tire dumps, battered vehicles — the exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris traces cars’ impact on the world through hundreds of photographs dating to the early 20th century.

But the show, Autophoto, also makes it easy to understand why photographers’ romance with the car may be as strong as ever. After all, the two go way back. After World War I, as cars proliferated, they opened up many parts of the world for exploration. And all the while, cameras were becoming simpler to use.

From the “Tractor Boys” series, 2010–2012.

Martin Bogren / VU’, Paris

“The industrial production of these two objects,” say the curators, “accelerated their distribution and contributed to the emergence of a combined practice: The camera became the indispensable accessory for drivers eager to immortalize their travels.”

One of the curators, Philippe Séclier, takes that idea a step further. Mr. Séclier, who is 58 and grew up outside Paris, recalls with pleasure the long car trips he took with his family. Later, he spent years driving around the United States taking photographs.

Those trips changed his perspective on cars.

“I think that a car is a camera box on wheels, with a frame in the windscreen,” he says.

That notion may help explain why in some of the photos on display, cars are implicit — barely hinted at or not seen at all. In one series, “Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert,’’ the only trace of a vehicle is a side-view mirror. Other photos show the world as seen from a car, although, naturally, that world often features other cars and the roads, structures and commercial establishments that have grown to support them.

Even when cars are the stars of the photos, the stories being told are more complex. Mr. Séclier and the exhibition’s other curator, Xavier Barral, have drawn on the work of photographers from around the world, and they have come away with portraits not just of automobiles but also of people, places and scenes that evoke eras.

The “American Dream” series shows couples posing formally by their cars in the 1950s and ’60s. The cars are shiny and undented. One wonders whether their owners are holding up as well, although their pride in their rides is obvious. Across the ocean, in images from the same period, similar expressions can be seen on the faces of Africans posing near their cars.

The exhibition’s intent is not to glamorize or be sentimental. The photos show the beauty of many cars and the beauty that the new mobility they provided allowed photographers to capture. But the show also shows the blighted landscapes that car culture has helped to create.